Island Time

"Theoretically sophisticated and written with a deeply engaging autoethnographic tone, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the (post)colonial dynamics and assumptions that animate defining discourses about small islands’ musical aesthetics in the twenty-first century Caribbean. In a bold and welcome move, Baker critically rethinks what in the West and in former colonies has been typically conceived as polar opposites—big and small islands, slow and fast tempo, women’s restrained and exuberant behaviors. In contrast, this book foregrounds the horizontal web of island relations, its forever ongoing transformation of conventions, and its sounding of familiarity and difference that produce the unmistakable feeling of Caribbeanness. An insightful and significant achievement!" -- Jocelyne Guilbault, University of California, Berkeley
"Drawing on Caribbean philosophy and fine-grained ethnography, Island Time engages with the simultaneity of disjunct regimes of time—the hyperactive beat of wylers music and tourism's promise of languor, developmentalist accounts of backwardness and the hypermodernity of "fast" girls—and a reticulate cultural geography by which the Caribbean archipelago's multitudes are experienced in the small-island nation of St. Kitts-Nevis." -- Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Boston University
"There is nothing small about the music that flows from the tiny Leeward islands of St. Kitts and Nevis. Nor can the implications of Jessica Swanston Baker’s Island Time be easily overstated. With graceful pen and shrewd ear, Baker gathers music scholars around a fresh preposition—from—showing just how much where matters in music." -- Braxton D. Shelley, Yale University